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Money-saving, money-simplifying fintech Snoop has seen impressive growth since launch, with over 100,000 downloads in just five months.
Unlike most of the saving apps out there, Snoop doesn’t just aggregate all your accounts, it also actively watches out for your finances, flagging when you’re spending too much on bills, and providing you with a fully personalised news feed of money-saving ideas to keep you on top of your money. Think of it like Instagram for finance.
Their crowdfunding campaign has already successfully raised over £5.3 million, with over 1,100 investors involved.
We sat down with founder and executive chair (and former CEO of Virgin Money), Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia to find out more.
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What is Snoop’s vision?
Snoop was created to make everyone better off.
The app uses secure open banking technology and a combination of sophisticated data analysis and human intelligence to deliver data-driven, hyper-personalised insights to help consumers to avoid rip-offs and make the most of their money.
We want to use technology and data to help people overcome the so-called £12 billion ‘loyalty penalty’. To put it all into perspective, the average household could save around £1,500 per year with Snoop on their phone.
What inspired you to start the company?
As a team with extensive banking experience, we knew a proposition based on the power of open banking had far greater potential than building a new bank from scratch. I’ve always been interested in using technology to make peoples’ lives easier and so we sketched out the problem we wanted to solve; how can we stop people being ripped off by big business and big banks? We then defined what we wanted to achieve as a team and how we’d go about doing it. The result is Snoop and I’ve been delighted with the progress so far!
What does Snoop do that distinguishes it from other fintech challengers?
Snoop takes the idea of money management much further than other fintechs by actively helping people use their data to help them save money. Hyper-personalisation and the ability to connect people with relevant and personalised money insights at exactly the right time is Snoop’s competitive advantage.
What’s more, we believe that by combining the best capability of the neo-banks, money management, price comparison websites, switching services, cashback sites and money saving services into one app – we can deliver something uniquely useful and better for consumers.
What has the growth journey looked like for Snoop?
20x growth in five months and customer acquisition cost materially below expectations, so a great start. But that’s all it is – a start! As a business we’re targeting over 600,000 customers and profitability by 2023.
How is the team qualified to deliver on the mission?
We joke that we must be one of the oldest fintech start-ups around! A nicer way of saying that is that the team has many years of experience and success in building brands, businesses and digital propositions. One of the most important things within that is that the team has managed success through both good times and bad, and sometimes it’s the ability of a team to manage the tough times that counts.
The balance of the team is strong and has the expertise, ambition and determination to make the business successful. We are a relentless bunch and are never satisfied!
Who is Snoop’s target user and how is the company reaching out to them?
The audience that wants to save money is huge and so we’ve made sure Snoop has broad-based appeal. Our ambition is to make everyone better off, but our initial focus has been on digitally-savvy customers in order to drive marketing efficiency. Interestingly, our early adopters have been older than expected (80% of customers are over 30 years of age), they’re more likely to have a mortgage, more likely to be married and have children and come from a wide geographic spread. The key to reaching them is a laser-like focus on social and digital channels and building a proposition which generates talkability and word of mouth recommendations.
What’s been one of the most exciting successes so far?
Achieving over 100,000 downloads and external recognition from the likes of The FinTech50 and ranking highly (5th) in BusinessCloud’s 100 Fintech Disruptors list has exceeded my expectations but, if I’m honest, nothing excites me more than hearing how Snoop has helped people save money! I look at our app store reviews every day and when people talk about how Snoop has helped them with their money it makes everything worthwhile.
What will be the greatest challenge going forward?
Over 25 million people use their mobile to manage their money and almost 50 million UK consumers have a current account. Snoop can plug into 50 banks, deliver consumers a better experience and save them lots of money. Our biggest challenge? Playing our part in bringing the benefits of open banking to the masses.
Why did you choose crowdfunding and what are you looking forward to with the proceeds and new investors brought in from this round?
The exciting thing about Snoop for me is that we’re building it with our customers and the engagement and feedback from our community has been incredible. As such we wanted to give our community exclusive access to our crowdfunding before opening it up to the general public. It’s a great way of everyone being able to share in the success of the business we’re building together. I’d like to welcome all of our new investors to Snoop’s journey – all 1,130 of them so far!
With this round of funding we’ll continue to bring more features, functionality and benefits to customers. We’ll increase our range of switching services to save customers even more money, enhance our data analytics capabilities to present more complex insights and spending profiles and expand our product team to enable faster app design and development. We’ll also expand our commercial team to uplift and expand revenue-generating streams and partnerships.
What’s one finance hack you’ve learned?
Small savings every day soon mount up!
What advice would you give someone new to finance?
As soon as you start working, ‘tax’ yourself 10% of your take home wages and put it into a savings account. Do it when you start working and maintain 10% throughout your career. You’ll never miss it and you’ll always have savings – a habit no one regrets!
What’s one thing you maybe spend too much money on?
Books. I love them but never have enough time to read everything I buy. I put them on my shelves and hope I absorb them by osmosis!
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To find out more about Snoop, visit the pitch now.
